Like many Mill Valley kids, Sammy Novick has a soccer picture and a class picture for every year since kindergarten, and that's not counting 10 or 15 albums of family photos or the online archive.

So she was shocked to learn that that there are places where kids have no soccer picture or class picture or any other kind of picture. Aleta Wondo, Ethiopia, is one of those places. So Novick appointed herself photographer, yearbook editor and oral historian for a school in this coffee bean region. Then she spent five weeks this summer living in a bamboo hut with a straw floor during the African rainy season in order to get the job done.

"Literally everything in my life is chronicled through photos," says Novick, who is 17 and a senior at Marin Catholic High School. "In America we take it for granted, but those kids don't have pictures of themselves."

Spending a junior summer helping out in some impoverished Third World village is by now such a cliche, for private schoolkids trying to advance to the elite private colleges, that admission officers are probably more intrigued by the applicants who don't do it. But Novick's motive was never mercenary, and she wasn't coached into it by a school counselor.

2 adopted siblings

She has two adopted siblings, Batri Novick and Eyasue Novick, who are Ethiopian and arrived with one picture taken of them together at the orphanage. Her parents, John and Tracy Novick, are both active with Common River, a humanitarian organization that built the primary school in "Wondo" as they call it.

So Novick had been there before, but never like this, hauling a digital camera and printer, plus 500 sheets of photo paper and color ink, all donated by Eastman Kodak. To get there took a six-hour flight to Washington, D.C., then a 14-hour flight to the capital city of Addis Ababa all the while with a printer on her lap. Then came the bumpy seven-hour bus ride.

The kids in Wondo were waiting for Novick because two summers ago she made quite an impression, arriving as she did with more than 100 remaindered soccer balls and jerseys she gathered from the clubs in Marin. To put that stuff to use, she organized them into teams.

A soccer clinic is one thing. All it takes is a flat patch of dirt. A photo studio takes a room with electricity. She set up in the school library and plugged in only to have the power go off and on throughout the project.

The studio backdrop was a woven wall inside the library building. The front-drop was a plain white V-neck T-shirt. Novick had brought five of them, planning to wear them herself, until the kids started posing in them and keeping them.

Luckily Novick had the backup of three Marin soccer friends - Stephanie Killpack, Caitlin Firmage and Grace Narlock - who were there on separate projects for Common River. It took the four of them five days to get 200 kids photographed. As each subject sat down, Novick would tape on a name tag and say, "Sock, sock, sock," which was her attempt at the Amharic word for smile.

"They would crack up whenever I would say it," she says. The interviews, done through an interpreter, took longer than the photos.

Kids' remarkable tasks

"Some of the things they do are so amazing,' she says, "like 6-year-olds collecting firewood and taking care of their baby siblings and preparing coffee. How they live is so different than an American child."

The last question she would ask was how many times had each subject been photographed.

"One kid said 50. I think that was ridiculous," she says. "Most said, 'First time.' "

The kid who claimed to have been photographed 50 times got his 51st, a hand-delivered print from Novick. Everyone else got their first. They were even more eager to see themselves than they were to see those soccer balls.

Months after her trip, she still talks about it everyday with her friends, and when she's not talking about it, she is texting about it.

Between soccer practice and Senior Council and the college application frenzy, Novick is so scattered and sidetracked that she has the words "SAT II" written in ink on the back of her hand, so she remembers to take the test.

She may forget about her own schoolwork, but she won't forget to finish that yearbook that she promised to deliver to the school in Wondo.